A century ago, Ambrose Bierce, the notorious San Francisco critic and satirist, famously wrote: "War is God's way of teaching Americans geography."

But if that's true, how to explain, then, that many, many years into our wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, a survey by National Geographic found that a majority of Americans ages 18 to 24 couldn't locate either country on a map.

More of them, though, were able to correctly identify the setting for the original "CSI" television show. (It was Las Vegas.)

Clearly we have more work to do. Which brings us to this year's Geography Quiz. As in the past, this is not so much a serious test of knowledge as it is a way for us to illuminate some fun facts we've stumbled upon in the past 12 months, usually while looking something else up. We hope it will convince you that our planet is an intriguing and wonderfully peculiar place, and well worth getting to know better.

As usual, there are no prizes involved for getting all, or most, of these questions right - just the smug satisfaction that you're not as much of a geographic dunderhead as your fellow Americans.

Tune in next week for the inevitable clarifications and corrections. There's nothing like having a million-strong army of fact-checkers on Sunday morning.

Answers are on Page M4

1. Clive James once described this Australian landmark as looking like "a portable typewriter full of oyster shells." What was he describing?

2 Thanks to a mistake by Ferdinand Magellan, this South American region's name means, roughly, "Land of the People With Big Feet." What are we referring to?

3 Which single Canadian province has given its name to two dog breeds?

4 Not only is this the world's smallest sovereign state, with a population of about 1,000, but it's pretty likely to stay that way: The birth rate is, year after year, zero.

5. Only three national parks straddle state borders: One is in North Carolina and Tennessee; one is in Nevada and California; and one spans parts of Idaho, Montana and Wyoming. Name them. Hint: One is the oldest national park, one the most visited and one the lowest.

6. Are all the "stan" countries - Afghanistan, Kazakhstan, etc. - contiguous, or does any "stan" stand alone?

7. In Budapest, what geographic feature separates Buda from Pest?

8. Which two countries face each other across the Yalu River?

9. About how many islands make up the Philippines?

a. Seven

b. 70

c. 700

d. 7,000

e. 70,000

10 Named for King Philip II of Spain, this nation - not Japan - invented karaoke, and is considered to be the text-messaging capital of the world, with its population of 92 million people sending, by some estimates, 350 million a day - more than the United States and Europe combined.

11 This landlocked European nation is the only sovereign grand duchy left in the world (which means it's ruled by a grand duke), claims the planet's highest gross domestic product per capita and is unfairly ranked by the Guinness Book of World Records as the world's leading consumer of alcohol.

12. Its name comes from a native term for "big village"; it's the second-largest country in the world (after Russia) and its inhabitants are the planet's leading consumers of macaroni and cheese.

13. This country has set aside a wilderness reserve for the yeti (otherwise known as the abominable snowman), has issued a postage stamp with a functioning, 4-inch-diameter CD-ROM on it, and measures its output in gross national happiness.

14. It has a navy with several thousand sailors, even though it's one of only two landlocked countries in South America. Thirty-one men served as president between 1904 and 1954; most were removed by coup. Dueling is still legal here - as long as both parties are registered blood donors.

15. Its national railway is the world's largest employer, with more than a million people on the payroll. Its film industry cranks out movies at the rate of almost three a day. It's the only country in the world with a bill of rights specifically for cows.

16. What European capital is below sea level?

17. If you were to travel from the Halls of Montezuma to the shores of Tripoli, where, exactly, would you be going?

18. Can you name the four faces on Mount Rushmore? OK, smarty pants, now name them from left to right.

19. A visitor to Turkey can hit the beach on the shores of four different seas. Name them.

20. Manchuria is part of which nation?

21. This nation, which borders Burma, was originally part of Pakistan. Name it.

22. Romansh, a derivative of Latin, is one of four official languages in this nation. Name it - and the three other languages.

23. What are the Benelux countries?

24. The mountain Aorangi, on New Zealand's South Island, is better known to non-Maoris as what?

25. Mauritania and Mauritius: Which one is a nation in West Africa, and which one is an island in the Indian Ocean?

26. Four nations have "Guinea" in their names. Can you identify them all?

27. Which of the following is not a real place?

a. Moldova

b. Molvania

c. Moldavia

28. The Taklimakan Desert covers 100,000 square miles, much of it sand dunes. Where would you find it?

29. This has the highest average elevation of all the continents - 7,500 feet - and is also the driest of them all: It gets, on average, only 2 inches of precipitation a year.

30 If you're sailing in the Mediterranean and want to get out, you have four exits. What are they? Three are pretty obvious, but we're guessing you'll have trouble with the fourth. You'll also need a fairly small boat to pull it off.

31. Where would you find the nation of Chad?

32. The basic design of the locks used in the Panama Canal (and most other canals and rivers) dates back to the Renaissance; it was dreamed up by a very clever fellow better known for other things. You might even call him the original Renaissance man. Who was this clever fellow?

33. Match the foodstuff with the place that owes the world an apology for it.

Food:

Poutine: French fries smothered in cheese curd and gravy.

Hakarl: Shark that's buried in sand for three months to get good and putrid. Anthony Bourdain called it "the single worst, most disgusting and terrible tasting thing" he has ever tasted.

36. Match the place with its closest antipodal latitude twin. (In other words, find a pair of cities, one in the Northern Hemisphere, the other in the Southern, that are about the same distance from the equator.)

Northern Hemisphere

Southern Hemisphere

San Francisco

Buenos Aires

Los Angeles

Rarotonga, Cook Islands

Chicago

Melbourne

London

Falkland Islands

Hawaii

Wellington, New Zealand

37. What two land masses wave at each other across the Torres Strait?

38. The Alps are a mountain range, of course. But if you speak of a single "alp," you're not talking about a single mountain. What, then is an "alp"?

39. The nation of Mongolia was once known as Outer Mongolia. Where would you find Inner Mongolia?

40. This U.S. state is divided into two parts connected by a bridge. The people who live north of the bridge, on the Upper Peninsula, are known as Yoopers and those who live below the bridge are called "trolls."

41. This landmark is 6 inches taller in the summer than in the winter, it was supposed to have been torn down and sold for scrap 20 years after it was built, and the man who designed it also designed the interior framework of the Statue of Liberty.

42. Uzbekistan is one of only two doubly landlocked countries in the world - i.e., it's a landlocked country surrounded by other landlocked countries. What's the other one? Hint: It's in Western Europe, and it's so small that the entire nation can be rented for corporate events.

43. True or false: There's a Rome on every continent except Antarctica.

44. Trade winds all around the world blow in the same general direction. What is it?

45. When we think of tulips, we think of Holland, but they weren't native to Europe. Where would you originally have to have gone to tiptoe through the tulips?

46. Lake Victoria, the source of the Nile (sort of; it's complicated; if it matters to you, consult an atlas), is Africa's largest lake and the planet's largest tropical lake. It sits at the juncture of three nations. Kenya and Uganda are two. The other nation has half the lake's shoreline. What is it?

47. What is the only U.S. state where coffee is grown?

Let's finish up with a little vexillology, which, as I don't need to tell you, is the study of flags.

48. Which U.S. state flag has the Big Dipper on it?

49. Which nation's flag has no ornamentation, so to speak: It's just a plain green rectangle?

50. Which U.S. state flag looks like a pennant with a bite taken out of it?

Answers

1. The Sydney Opera House.

2. Patagonia. Magellan somehow got it into his head that it was populated by giants with enormous feet. Pata means "foot" in Portuguese; where the "gones" came from is something of a mystery.

3. Labrador and Newfoundland

4. Vatican City

5. Great Smoky Mountains National Park, in North Carolina and Tennessee, is the most visited national park; Yellowstone National Park, which is mostly in Wyoming, but spills over into Montana and Idaho, is the oldest; Death Valley is the lowest. (Death Valley's eastern border mostly follows the California-Nevada state line, but a little bit of it pokes into Nevada.)

6. They're contiguous.

7. The Danube River.

8. China and North Korea

9. d. 7,107 to be precise. About 4,000 of them are inhabited.

10. The Philippines

11. Luxembourg. Its ranking as the alcohol-consumption capital of the world is misleading, because it includes the sizable amount of low-tax alcohol purchased by French, German and Belgian visitors.

12. Canada. If you believe the Canadian band Barenaked Ladies, when Canadians get rich they season their macaroni and cheese with Dijon ketchup.

13. Bhutan

14. Paraguay

15. India. Note that Sweden, and possibly other countries, has a bill of rights that covers all farm animals.

16. Amsterdam. It is officially the capital of the Netherlands, even though the parliament has been seated in The Hague since the 1500s.

17. In the 1847 Mexican-American War, U.S. Marines - along with a young Robert E. Lee - stormed the Castle of Chapultepec, which at the time guarded the entrance to Mexico City but now is in the center of it. According to the Marines' Web site, the castle is "better known as the Halls of Montezuma," although only the Marines seem to call it that. Montezuma, whose name is more properly spelled Moctezuma, had been absent from the scene for a couple of centuries before the castle was built. After the Marines left, the castle became the home of the ill-fated Emperor Maximilian. The shores of Tripoli are in modern-day Libya. Tired of paying ransom to pirates operating out of what at the time was known as the Barbary Coast, President Thomas Jefferson dispatched a fighting force to set things right, which eventually it did. It was the first time the U.S. flag was ever raised in victory on foreign soil. Ten years later, the piracy problem returned and the United States had to go back and fight a second war to end it. Incidentally, "The Marine Hymn" gets it backward: They went to the shores of Tripoli before the Halls of Montezuma.

18. Left to right, they are: George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Theodore Roosevelt and Abraham Lincoln.

19. The Black, Aegean, Mediterranean and the Sea of Marmara.

20. China

21. Bangladesh. After the partition of India in 1947, it became a noncontiguous province called East Pakistan, or sometimes East Bengal. It broke away after a bloody war in 1971. A tiny bit borders Burma, but mostly it is surrounded by India.

22. Switzerland. The others are German, French and Italian.

23. Belgium, the Netherlands and Luxembourg

24. Mount Cook. Since 1998 its official name has been Aoraki/Mount Cook (using the spelling from the Ngai Tahu dialect of Maori). No disrespect to the great explorer, but the Maori name is unbeatably poetic: It means "cloud piercer."

25. Mauritania is in West Africa; Mauritius is in the Indian Ocean.

26. There are three in Africa - Guinea, Guinea-Bissau, Equatorial Guinea (which, incidentally, is not on the equator) - and Papua New Guinea.

27. Molvania is the fake one. It's the subject of a wickedly funny, if rather un-PC, parody of Lonely Planet-style guidebooks called "Molvania: A Land Untouched by Modern Dentistry." Moldova, wedged between Romania and the Ukraine, is a nation that won its independence from the Soviet Union in 1991. Moldavia is a former principality, whose territory is now partly in Romania and partly in Moldova.

28. Western China

29. Antarctica. Most of the elevation is due to an icecap a mile thick.

30.

1. The Strait of Gibraltar, which, of course, gets you into the Atlantic Ocean. 2. The Suez Canal, which connects to the Red Sea. 3. Through the Aegean Sea to the Dardanelles (a.k.a. the Hellespont) in Turkey, which takes you, via the Sea of Marmara and the Bosporus Strait, into the Black Sea. 4. If your boat isn't too big you could enter the Canal du Midi at Sete, France, west of Marseilles, and follow it all the way to its end at the Garonne River, which spills into the Bay of Biscay and the Atlantic.

31. Central Africa

32. Leonardo da Vinci

33. Poutine - French Canada

Hakarl - Iceland

Haggis - Scotland

A-ping - Cambodia

Cuy - Peru (and other Andean regions)

34. Shirley Temple. The former childhood actress served as ambassador to Ghana from 1974-76 and as ambassador to Czechoslovakia from 1989-92.

35. c. Shakespeare. It first appears in "Henry IV," written in 1597. We just made up the name "Ernesto Samsonite," by the way.

36. San Francisco - Melbourne

Los Angeles - Buenos Aires

Chicago - Wellington, New Zealand

London - Falkland Islands

Hawaii - Rarotonga, Cook Islands

37. Australia and New Guinea. Australia, incidentally, is considered by geographers to be either the world's largest island or smallest continent.

38. "Alp" actually means "high pasture."

39. China

40. Michigan

41. The Eiffel Tower

42. Liechtenstein, which shares borders with landlocked Switzerland and Austria. Uzbekistan, in case you were wondering, is bordered by Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Afghanistan and Turkmenistan, none of which has a single mile of coastline.

43. True

44. East to west. Specifically, north of the equator they blow northeast to southwest, and south of the equator they blow southeast to northwest.

45. Europe's tulips were almost certainly imported to Western Europe from Turkey in the mid- to late-1500s, probably by Holy Roman Emperor Ferdinand I's ambassador to the Ottoman Empire. They're native to Central Asia.

46. Tanzania

47. Hawaii. Incidentally, it and South Carolina are the only states that grow tea.